Newt is a simple Mac OS X utility that notifies you about new questions, answers, comments and reputation changes.
Now, everyone can become a Jon Skeet!

[DEPRECATED]

I enjoyed making this app very much and glad that many people found it useful as well. However, with other things taking over, I found I have little time to maintain it or for StackExchange in general. And now that the old SE API is shut down, it is effectively broken.
There are, however, plenty of other worthy notification apps around: many more than there were three years ago when I started writing Newt.

I wish you worthy questions and thoughtful answers! And leave a message if you'd like to take over and maintain Newt.

Screenshot / Code Snippet

About

Newt is for people who want to follow their favourite Stack Exchange sites, but don't want to constantly click the refresh button. It'll notify you about questions on interesting topics, answers to your questions, comments for you and reputation changes.

It's also intended to be simple and intuitive, so even non-programmers can use it.

but but..and for the poor guys that are still running on Mac OS X 10.5.8?
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systempuntooutFeb 9 '11 at 12:03

1

@systempuntoout I'll work on that :) The problem is, I inadvertently used some 10.6 features, like Blocks, so porting it back now isn't as easy as changing build target. But I'll post an update in a few days.
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Nikita RybakFeb 9 '11 at 12:09

I can't install this app. It doesn't even run at all? Someone can help?
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user5629Mar 4 '11 at 13:47

Can I run it under 10.6.6?
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user5629Mar 4 '11 at 13:53

@Tassisto It doesn't have to be installed. Just install growl and copy it to apps folder. And yes, I run it on 10.6.6. If something fails, please tell the details.
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Nikita RybakMar 4 '11 at 20:59

you're right it doesn't install, I was waiting for that. But it sais that I can only login in an account with 200 points reputation, what's that?
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user5629Mar 5 '11 at 9:58

@Tassisto Where does it say that? Also, I repeat, there's no installation.
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Nikita RybakMar 5 '11 at 10:06

I know, no installation! The first thing I do when it runs. I go to preferences, I check (under Site) StackOverflow. Then I need to paste the url of my profile. After these steps it shows me a little rectangle with this text: "You do not have any linked accounts with 200+ rep :("
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user5629Mar 5 '11 at 10:50

the goal of this app is to follow what others commented/answered on your questions, right?
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user5629Mar 5 '11 at 10:51

@Tassisto That's not an error, although I see how it's confusing. That's your Stack Exchange flair. Normally it shows user's picture and SO profiles with above 200 rep, but you seem to have neither. I'll think what can be done about it in the next versions, but be assured that everything runs.
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Nikita RybakMar 5 '11 at 12:26

@Tassisto One of them. Another goal is to be notified when people post questions on interesting topics.
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Nikita RybakMar 5 '11 at 12:28

at the moment I'm only interested on my questions :p. at this moment I don't want to see random posts, can I configure newt to allow only posts on my questions?
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user5629Mar 7 '11 at 8:30

10 Answers
10

thanks for the app. I do however, feel that it overloads me for two reasons:

it shows me all new questions for a site. Would be much better if I could select the tags for which I want to see new questions;

it flashes too quickly, and I can't look at all notifications. If we could configure the display time, would be awesome, or the display time could depend on the number of notifications at the same time.

2) Another trick: if you hover your mouse over notification, it won't disappear until you move the mouse away.
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Nikita RybakJun 28 '11 at 2:37

It would also be nice if I could see questions by particular authors only. (For example, I don't spend much time on the cooking site, but my wife does; I always enjoy reading her questions.)
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neilfeinJul 5 '11 at 3:22

Every so often I'll get a bunch of reputation notifications--"a bunch" as in one for every site the app is monitoring. Am I correct in thinking that this is because there's been a network-wide recalc, or is there some other reason for this?

Edit: This is happening several times a day. Obviously not due to a recalc!

Also, it'd be nice if there were some way of dismissing the windows with a keyboard shortcut. (Either all of them or one-by-one.) Or, perhaps you could simply add a "dismiss all" menu item?

My one nitpick is that it shows reputation changes for SE sites twice; once for the regular site, and once for the accompanying meta site. Meta sites don't have their own reputation, instead the main site reputation is synchronized every hour and voting on meta sites doesn't lead to reputation gain or loss. Thus, if you gained reputation on the main site, within an hour Newt notifies you of the same reputation changes for the meta site.

Only for stackoverflow.com and meta.stackoverflow are rep changes shown only once, which is to be expected; the SO / MSO relation is special and reputation on MSO is counted and separate.

Can reputation for all meta sites (except MSO) be ignored in Newt please?

Have been using Newt for almost a month, it is great, and it mostly does my job, there are however a few features that I miss:

Ignored tags

Questions containing the ignored tags are not displayed.

Update 6/1/2013: I was frustrated with dozens of Android questions (which I am not interested in) because they had Java tag (which I am interested in), I have implemented this feature myself in my Newt fork on github.

Thank you very much for this nice application. I really like the way it handles all the notifications and how you can configure them... I have one feature idea/suggestions and one issue:

Idea: I would love to see a "Silent Buffer" (not sure if this is possible to implement). Sometimes one needs to "sleep" newt (because is going to a meeting, giving a presentation, wants no notifications "for a while", etc.). This "silent buffer" would allow to "buffer" all the "relevant questions" take were asked while in that state, i.e., when we would come back we would get (probably this needs to be limited to a certain max number - last 5/10) list of questions asked in the mean time. I can see some issues, e.g.: the growl notifications would need to be "sticky" otherwise we would simply not read all of them...

Issue: I use Mac OS Lion, and after I put the computer to sleep and restarting it, newt stays in a "No internet connection mode", although I do have Internet... I have to change to some status (e.g.: to "silent mode" then back to "full mode") to get it working.